Enterprises are increasingly capturing, storing, and mining a plethora of information related to communications with their customers. Often this information is stored and indexed within databases. Once the information is indexed, queries are developed on an as-needed basis to mine the information from the database for a variety of organizational goals.
The enterprise data can originate from a myriad of sources and even external feeds, but ultimately the goal for the enterprise is that all the data be consolidated, indexed, and related within a central enterprise data warehouse.
A major portion of data warehouse management is defining and managing data relationships. A data relationship is data needed to control an association of one piece of data within the data warehouse with another piece of data within the data warehouse. Often this control requires enforcement of enterprise business processes; some processes are automated and some processes are manual.
Thus, it can be seen that improved techniques for data relationship management are desirable.